Too much trash, too little effort to clean it up

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/09/2024 (384 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Early in the morning, almost every working day, across from the McPhillips Station Casino, right next to Jarvis Avenue, a man comes out of the strip mall with a long set of tongs and a garbage bag, and works his way around the parking lot.

Every morning, he picks things up: a discarded shirt, a shoe, pieces of a broken bottle, fast-food trash, a pizza box. There are beer cans and reusable grocery bags, bike tires and chip bags.

He gets them all.

And the next day, there are always more.

Sometimes, regularly, the glass is broken out of one side of the bus shelter there, subject to some random schedule of destruction. The vandalism shows all the signs of being a staccato pulse of frustration.

But the trash?

The trash is a constant.

And it’s not just at McPhillips and Jarvis.

In the dry days of summer, even in quiet, tree-lined neighbourhoods, a long triangular stain of dried Slurpee on the pavement leads, at its widest point, to the thrown-away cup that used to contain the liquid before it was tossed from a car window. There’s a triangular plastic box that used to contain a sandwich. Oddly, there’s a pair of pants.

Fences along major routes catch all manner of trash, from stray clothes to packing materials to wind-torn, ragged sheets of plastic. Cardboard boxes abound: sometimes intact, sometimes torn, sometimes flattened after they’ve made their way into the street. Walk enough, and you are certain to see someone fling trash from a car window.

At a super mailbox at Fife and Boyd, a Thursday’s flyer delivery has been taken out of several different mailboxes and strewn around on the ground, some pieces blowing down Fife on the afternoon winds. At Redwood, a discarded mailing envelope and a message — “You parked in my spot!” — that had clearly been left on someone’s windshield, pulled out from under the wiper and tossed.

Sometimes, the litter looks like evidence of something else: behind buildings and in laneways, ripped-open store packaging for things that might have been snatched from shelves, discarded boxes of over-the-counter medications.

But a lot of it just looks like the results of people who couldn’t care less, and a city that can’t seem to get a handle on even the most basic of services: emptying its own trash cans.

Garbage cans are filled to overflowing, and if they aren’t spilling their contents because of that, their tops have been flung open, rummaged trash spread around them in a wide circle. In parks, stoop-and-scoop bags of dog poop overtop the available bins.

It’s not like this in Toronto; it’s not like this in St. John’s or Halifax, in Saskatoon or in Ottawa.

But it’s like this in Winnipeg. Other cities have their challenges, too, but the level of litter and trash here is really quite remarkable.

Are there solutions? Sure. More bins. A more diligent effort to make sure they all get emptied. A system to deal with the litter that isn’t in the bins.

And us: we can do better. We should do better. Our kids should do better.

Some people do already.

Sometimes, it’s just one guy.

Just one guy who comes out, every morning, and cleans a stretch of asphalt and lawn, knowing that in the great city scheme, it’s one small island of effort. It’s Sisyphus, rolling today’s Winnipeg litter boulder back up the hill, knowing it will be back at the bottom of the hill tomorrow.

Anyone who does it should have our thanks. And anyone who contributes to the mess, our disdain.